>> Okay, are we on?
Hello. This is the Friday, September 26,
2025 Sustainability Framework Advisory Committee meeting here in the work session room.
Our first -- we have a quorum.
And our first item for individual consideration is approval of the August 22nd, 2025 minutes.
Any discussion or movement on the minutes to approve?
>> I second.
>> All right.
Moved and seconded?
To approve, all in favor?
>> Aye.
>> All opposed?
All right, the minutes are adopted.
Our next item is to receive a report and hold a discussion regarding water conservation incentives.
>> We have Hayley Salazar.
She's our water resources administrator with the water utilities to present this item.
No, you don't have to go into PowerPoint.
Here we go.
[ Inaudible ]
>> Well, thank you so much for having me today.
Thank you, Catherine, for inviting me to come share the work we've been doing.
Before we dive directly into our conservation incentives,
there's just a little obligatory history I wanted to go through to kind of couch what it is we're doing and how we got here.
The first real authority we had or tool to help coach residential behavior to really value water was our lawn and landscape coordinates, and that was passed in 2006.
What that ordinance does is it prohibits irrigation systems being in disrepair, excessive irrigation use,
and it also says not to irrigate between 10 a.m. and 6 p.m. June 1st through September 30th to avoid evaporative losses.
And then it also prohibits irrigation and freezing temperatures as well.
It also prohibits excessive water waste, and this was a really big step forward for the city.
Prior to that, we didn't have really anything in place to coach conservation and irrigation behaviors.
Around that same time, we passed our water conservation and drop contingency plan.
This is a two-part document, and it tells us, one, how do we value water in everyday use when water is in what we call average times?
We always kind of have those secular, wet, dry years, but these are times when we are not in drought.
And it's kind of like, what are the rules, regulations, and expectations on how we use water in that period versus the drought contingency portion,
which talks about how do we maximize the water we have strategically in times when supplies are compromised?
And so that two-part document is updated every five years.
And historically, the conservation portion has been heavily supported by sustainability.
They've been our outward face. They've been doing our marketing.
They've done a fantastic job engaging with our classroom and our communities.
However, on the water side, specifically water utilities, our focus in the past had always been on the drought contingency portion and kind of that disaster mitigation plan.
With the change of leadership in our department several years ago, that also brought forth the desire to say,
well, what can water do to partner with sustainability instead of just relying on sustainability alone to kind of promote that water conservation component?
And so with that, it was our cycle again in 2024 to update this plan.
And we included a twice-a-week mandatory irrigation schedule as part of that conservation component of the plan.
And we recognize, especially for our long-term DIN residents, this is quite the change.
And so what we've done to support our residents to get there is, even though the schedule went live, May 1st,
we decided to spend three years heavily educating the public instead of being enforcement driven.
And we also implemented, so we have a three-year grace period within reason where we're not even talking about issuing fines or punitive measures.
We just want to educate, educate, educate. And then we also want to help.
So for that help and getting our part to meet residents halfway, we've implemented some conservation incentives,
which is what I'm here to talk to you guys about today.
And so through this supportive take and through our community, which the response has been fantastic,
just to see the desire of our community to want to conserve and to value water, we've seen a really good response so far.
The reason all of our incentives, which you all will see, focuses on irrigation is because that's the largest discretionary use of water that we have.
It accounts for 70 percent of our discretionary water use.
And irrigation alone comes close to doubling the amount of water we have to produce if you compare our winter months to our summer months.
And so as kind of the low-hanging fruit, so to speak, and the biggest area of opportunity,
that's where we started our focus with our program.
To give you guys an idea of just how impactful the focus on irrigation and changing habits can be,
simply implementing a twice-a-week irrigation schedule and achieving 70 percent compliance
will allow us to serve an additional 16,000 residents than we would have been able to otherwise.
The reason that math works is because before we're dealing with plant capacity and peak uses with unregulated irrigation times,
now that we have a schedule and we've normalized those peaks and kind of set different groups for different days,
we're not dealing with spikes and we're not having to worry about upsizing our infrastructure before we need to, just with some strategic use.
So that's where that number comes from.
So the incentives themselves are heavily irrigation-focused and this is our inaugural year.
We did a soft launch in February and we worked, so between May 2024 and this February, we worked really closely with Catherine and her team.
They have a wealth of knowledge when it comes to the GreenSense incentives.
So they helped us a lot in coaching on how do we have, how do we mirror that program,
how do we learn from those successes and implement something that's very similar and effective for the resident perspective.
And so this first year, again, soft launch in February, we didn't really do any marketing, it's all been word of mouth.
We have had 26 individuals apply for our controller rebate.
What that is, a resident can request an EPA, a resident can purchase an EPA water-sense approved controller
and we will reimburse them for that controller up to $300.
Anything beyond $300 is typically more agricultural-based and we are focusing just on our residents.
But we have had 26 individuals take advantage of that and those rebates will appear on their utility bill.
So they send us the receipt, they show us proof that that controller was in fact installed at that residence.
Yes, sir.
Can I interrupt for a second?
Of course.
My question, on the controller rebate, I don't know what that is.
Is a controller something that puts a time schedule on a person's watering system?
Yes, exactly.
So if somebody has an automated irrigation system, it's just that control box where you can set your schedule.
The benefit to these newer water-sense ones are they have become digital.
And so you can check and see if it's going off at anomalous times.
One of the biggest sources of high-bill complaints, which is high bills that are shopping to our residents,
are the older timers, especially the dial ones, can have ghost settings on them.
We found so many residents are doing the right thing and they have it set to Tuesday and Thursday.
And there's a hidden cycle that you can't find that's also going off another day.
And a lot of people are asleep between 2 a.m. when they go off and they have no idea.
So this is just really helpful getting data to our residents to have that kind of digital footprint.
And they're so much easier to maintain, especially if you've seen the ones from the '70s and '80s on the dial.
These are vast improvements.
I was curious because there are a number of systems in the neighborhoods where I live,
where they will actually be watering when it's raining.
And I didn't know if the controller had any sort of sensory capabilities,
if a certain amount of humidity in the air that the sprinklers don't come on,
even though they're set to come on at a certain time.
So yes, these water-wise controllers, many of them also come with components that are soil moisture sensors.
And some of these you can also sync up to weather data and then have that enhanced functionality if not, you know, water in the rain.
Sure. So I could get a system like that and get a rebate for it.
Yes.
That's great. Yeah, thanks.
Yeah, we're really excited about it.
We also have another program that we're really excited about called the Irrigation Evaluation Program.
And what that is, we have a licensed TCEQ irrigator on staff and they will go out to the residents property.
They will, and essentially they'll find any areas of vulnerability in the system
and then also help them make sure that they understand how to work their controller
and that it's set to the proper timings and that it doesn't have any ghost settings.
The way this typically works is a resident reaches out, we get back to them within a day or within a business day.
Within a couple of days, we schedule the site visit. It starts out by listening, hearing their irrigation story.
What questions do they have? What would they like to learn more about?
And then we run the system zone by zone and then we will mark anywhere a sprinkler is in disrepair or there could be a leak
or if there's even a lack of coverage where the sprinklers aren't going far enough.
And she will provide an overview of where all the damaged areas are and then also set their controller to the proper dates
if they're not set and give an overview of how to run their controller.
And so you'll see next to that one I have 28 plus 51.
We've had 28 people reach out specifically just for the irrigation evaluation.
We've had an additional 51 people go through this process as a prerequisite for our Turf By-Bak program which I'll talk about in just a moment.
So that is the irrigation evaluation done by a staff member.
The next item I have is our sprinkler tune-up program.
And this is similar to the irrigation evaluation in that it involves a licensed TCEQ irrigator coming to the property and running a check on the system.
However, this one is a rebate for a third party.
The difference is a third party is able to actually manipulate the system, replace any broken heads, do any repairs that the resident would like because it's not city staff.
And so we give a rebate for that service of $100.
We encourage residents to use that rebate twice a year.
All residents are able to use it, a water account are able to use that twice a year.
And the idea is you have your irrigator come out in the spring before irrigation season starts.
They run the system, they make sure it's in working order, and then they come back before you shut it down.
Typically, sometime in November, plus or minus, but the goal in the fall would be to make sure everything's shut down.
The backflow prevention device has been blown off, it's been loosened to avoid frost and freeze damage.
And then that component of the system is shut down to avoid any subterranean leaks, which are really hard to detect when the pipes freeze in the winter,
especially within the irrigation system, you can get that slow drip leak and increase your water bill.
So this will help prohibit that as well.
What about commercial customers, like some of the auto dealerships I know have extensive watering systems,
are they dealt with in any way with any incentives?
So not yet, but I do, we actually have this, a couple slides down the row,
that is kind of one of our next goals is to go beyond residential and then reach out to both commercial and institutional.
So that would be the ISD, and then TWU, UNT, the county, how can we partner with them specific to their needs?
And then we also want to start working with our development community to be a bit more proactive and say,
well, how can we start off on the right foot instead of correcting?
So we've got some fantastic staff members at development services who have been eager and collaborative.
Do you have any idea of how many, rough idea of how many irrigation, residential irrigation systems there are in the city?
Very rough, it's rudimentary, but we have 47,000 residential accounts.
And we estimate about half of those accounts have irrigation systems.
Where it gets kind of hard is unless, I'm in an older neighborhood and we've got a lot of separate irrigation meters where I'm at,
but in a lot of the newer homes, it's all in the same meter, so it gets a little hard to estimate, but long story long, somewhere in the 20,000 range.
Okay, thank you, I appreciate it.
I know we have so many slides to get through.
I was actually relatedly going to ask, when you say 70% of water usage is irrigation, how is that determined?
So you're saying we have 46,000 residential accounts and you believe half of those have systems.
And then of course, the question might be how many run them systems, how often do they run their systems?
Are you looking strictly at metering for those types of accounts or how do you determine usage by that category?
Yeah, so right now it is rudimentary.
We have a shiny new tomorrow where AMI, AMR, or advanced metering technology is implemented.
Right now we are in long, so we have a physical meter reader go by and we can look at volumes.
And it's pretty easy to deduce who is running an irrigation system or has a pool or something like that, just kind of based on volumetric thresholds.
And if you look at our rate structure, that's also how we set our rates too.
I think $3.73 per 1,000 gallons for the first 5,000, and then it goes up and up and up for there.
And I think you're at about $12 if you're over per 1,000, if you're over 50,000 gallons, which is a lot of water.
But we, so we have some thresholds in place that kind of cut off what would or wouldn't constitute discretionary water use.
If we're talking at the bit for AMI, that's going to be such a game changer to be able to see exactly who's irrigating and who's not.
But as far as that 70% figure goes, that's 70% of discretionary water use.
And so what we look at is our wintertime averages are, they range.
But we're typically seeing under 20 million gallons a day, closer to 18 million gallons a day of finished water is our demand in the winter.
And that's when we're not irrigating.
So we're looking at November, December, January, February.
And then when you look at the summer, we get closer to 40 million gallons.
And so what we found is 70% of that additional 20 million gallons is strictly tied to irrigation.
And there's a couple other ways to kind of look at that.
We've got a SCADA system, which is our, basically the monitors pressure and water flow throughout the system for both of our plants.
And you can see these spikes throughout town between 2 o'clock and 4 a.m. hour, which is typically when irrigation systems run.
You see those pressure drops, and then the demand spikes up.
And that's a pretty clear indication that it's irrigation.
That's really interesting. Thank you.
I have one more quick one.
Has there been any consideration to cistern systems or rain capture systems that people have that they use to water their gardens or whatever?
Yeah, actually, the rain barrel program, it has been, there's been a lot of opinions on it.
But Catherine's group has actually been championing that.
So we've been able to help a little bit with the finding on that so far.
But that has been something that mostly her team has been promoting.
And we've got we've got two classes coming up.
And it's it's been really neat.
We've been seeing wait lists.
And so it's 50 people per class sometimes.
It's 25 to 50, but you actually get a rain barrel and the girl that works for Catherine.
She she does all the work herself and it's a live demonstration.
And so we apologize for speaking for your program.
Like I'm doing it. It's all them.
But what's really neat is they're really dedicated to having a live instructor there for Q&A.
And she's done a really good job learning the different specifics of how would you get up to mommy gutter or how would you.
So we would love to expand it, but we do have it now.
Good. Thank you.
Yeah. So so that's the variation evaluation.
That's staff where we come out.
It's completely free, but we can't manipulate or perform any repairs versus a sprinkler tune up where it is a third party license insurance.
And we're here here who can touch the system.
And that was a rebate. And really exciting.
Our first five act program, which we've been blown away by the interest.
We've had 51 different applicants so far.
And some stage of the application and close to 20 have actually completed the process.
The turf by that program focuses on lawns, typically Bermuda or St. Augustine, but really water hungry grass.
A lot of irrigation used in the summer is specifically for this grass, which naturally goes kind of yellow in the summer.
So if you see a green lawn, it's actually been pulled out of its natural cycle, out of the dormancy it wants to go into through additional water use.
And so instead of pouring money into upsizing our infrastructure, we thought,
what if we put some of that money aside and subsidize our residents today to just not use the grass in the first place?
And so we very generously offer five dollars per square foot of grass removed.
Now, it has to be healthy grass. It has to be grass that you can look at and say, oh, yeah, this is being irrigated.
And it's a minimum of 400 square feet. And once you go beyond 10,000 square feet, the price does drop to either two or three dollars and fifty cents per square foot.
And the goal of that is just we don't want somebody to wipe out the whole program.
We want we want a lot of people to be able to participate and they replace that turf with natives.
So it can be an extensive list of native plants.
We've worked with peanut flower farms and plant factories and other nurseries as well to get a list of cultivars that are not only acceptable, but that you can find here.
We didn't want to give folks a list of plants that they would they could order for three dollars plus fifty dollars shipping because they're not grown here.
So and the goal of that is to native scape or a prairie scape their yard.
We like to steer away from the term zero scape because in a lot of people's mind, they think of zero scape from where it was born out of,
which is Arizona, Utah, and pebbles and cactus.
But we actually have such a unique opportunity to have literally a symphony of colors kind of going off your ground with the proper landscaping.
And so by nature of these being native scaped, they're native and adaptive to our environment and they don't need a supplemental rainfall that's being used for the grass.
So what that does is that greatly reduces their demand for water and it also kind of makes a statement.
I know it can be hard to be the first person in your neighborhood if all the yards look the same and green grass looks beautiful.
I mean, it does. It's nostalgic. It's beautiful.
And it can be a challenge to be the first one to be different.
And so with this incentive and kind of helping people get there and all the educational tools we've put together,
we hope that we can encourage people to be the first one to do it in their neighborhood.
And in that way, it kind of breaks the ice for the other residents as well, if they're interested.
That's a good question.
Of course.
Are any of the developers being encouraged to do that for new construction so that you don't have that one lawn that's standing out but the whole neighborhood is native scape?
We are working on it. We actually have two, got a couple things in the pipe on that.
But we have two staff members at Development Services that are changing the, I'm going to get it wrong,
but it's essentially a point table for developers to choose from.
Historically in the past, there's so much criteria you have to develop with.
And then you can pull, kind of pick and choose from this point table list to hit a set number of points.
In addition to the rules you have to follow, and that's kind of the criteria.
We've modified the criteria, I believe it was 60% turf or less, now it's 30% or less, and then they get extra points.
In the past it was extra points for 30% or less, now it's extra for 10% or less.
And we're also working on incentivizing specific native cultivars as well and getting them points where before that was never even an option.
And I think there's also, Jimmy in Development Services is working on updating the code.
There's nothing at this point in time that specifies subterranean drip irrigation as what's being used to establish new tree growing.
So right now developers have been not given guidance to not use spray irrigation, which is not effective.
It just takes a lot of water, so we're kind of chipping away at that, but we've got plans to kind of make a bigger dent as well, but that's where we are right now.
You mentioned that you have a list of native plants?
Yes.
Are you collaborating with Native Plant Society?
And do you advertise to the residents nurseries around Denton that sell native plants?
We do. So the Native Plant Society specifically, we have gathered resources with them, but we haven't had a direct dialogue.
However, with multiple nurseries around here, we have had that direct dialogue and collaborated on plant lists.
Specifically, Painted Flower Farms has been just so generous with their time.
They've not only reviewed our entire manual, but they added probably a whole other page of listings of cultivars that through our research we didn't know about.
And again, they also kind of added different varieties and then removed some that would be good but not readily available, and so they've been fantastic.
We have, twice a year, we have a conservation meeting where we invite all of our landscapers, our irrigators, and our nurseries to come and just learn about the program,
learn about our watering schedule as well.
The invite list that goes out for that, we just pulled, we reached out to all the nurseries personally, and we went to development services and pulled all the contractors who have an active contractor registration for either irrigation or landscaping on file,
and then reached out to them.
An incentive for them to come to the meeting is when we do things like that initial irrigation evaluation for the turf buyback,
they, once they pass the class and make a pledge that they're going to promote our schedule, they get put on the list.
We can't pick anyone specifically from the list, but we can hand that out to residents and say here's a resource of people who have taken the time and have literally put their signature on the line to be in compliance with us, so hopefully that's a good incentive for them.
We have another list of non-recommended plants for people's lawns, so let me tell you, I have an issue with Craig Myrtle.
Craig Myrtle drinks lots of water, so it may be that residents should know about that, although it looks nice, but first of all it's not native, and indeed it brings lots of water.
That is a great idea.
And especially maybe the industrial sites or the new constructions that are around, because they like that bush, but I don't think if we talk about water conservation we should use that for landscape, especially if we go towards natives.
I love that. That hasn't occurred to us until you mentioned it just now, but we do have a very large retrospective planned in October, and the goal of that is just to look at what went well, what could we have done better, and then how we want to grow next year, and I'll make sure that's included in the list. Thank you.
I think about scalability a lot, and a lot of the questions I had for you, you kind of answered some of them, and I'm conflicted even saying this because I used to be the manager of Painted Flower, and I really support the Turf By-Back program, I just understand it comes at quite the cost.
And so I was just looking at some of the math on the metrics that you have here, and the 519,000 gallons a year, and the 14,000 valuation metrics, and I'm breaking that down to roughly about 10,000 gallons per week if we're just doing apples to apples on the Turf By-Back compared to the irrigation evaluation metrics.
In the way that your department thinks about, you know, where's our biggest thing for a buck, how do we scale up these programs for where we have, you know, one licensed irrigator, thousands, four to six thousand residential irrigation accounts, how do you think about that scalability and where we are really getting the biggest thing for a buck out of these programs?
Yeah, that's a great question as well. So just to be clear too, with the Turf By-Back, we have 51 volts who are somewhere within the process, but it's between 10 and 20, when I wrote this presentation it was 14, but we had two more people get approved, maybe more, and so that 519 is just the gallons so far this year since their approval for those 12.
And so I just want to be clear because I think that's kind of, now that I look at it, that's kind of confusing how I put it up there, but we do, one of the metrics we looked at is there's a small, can I say this, canopyo, if I could be wrong, there's a small town outside of El Paso and then there's some other entities in Arizona and Utah that have successful Turf By-Back programs,
and we've been really beneficial to not be on the cutting edge because they have the analytics for us to look at, and one of the biggest return of investments is, kind of what I touched on earlier, is the effect of other folks kind of joining in outside the program, and it's kind of hard to measure those tertiary benefits, but based on the studies we have, within a 17 house radius, two additional people convert a significant portion of their lawn for every one that's subsidized.
I hesitate to share those metrics though because as you go down the rabbit hole of those metrics, and those two encourage two more, and you kind of get some wacky, unbelievable figures the more you do that, so I'm always a little hesitant to throw that out there, but the return on investment from what we've calculated so far, our expectations are, it's a loss year one, it's a break even year two, and then year three and out.
That's when we start to see the return on investment, and so we'll see, we've got that retrospective in October again, and we're going to try to prove up the math, and I'm really hoping we have enough data to prove it up.
So going forward then, in this particular program, we're keeping the funding consistent, and we're just evaluating, keeping funding consistent and evaluating them on year three, you're hoping it's that threshold point where we're starting to see that net gain over the ROI?
Yeah, so that's exactly what we're going to do, and we even, it was earlier this year where we, we've had to pivot a little bit in the first year, you know there's no better QC than we can spend all day looking at what we've put together, and then when somebody, we're doing the practical application of the program, and a resident works through and they come up with things we didn't think about.
That's where we kind of threw in the reduced payment for over 10,000 square feet that we need to get down to another 2 or 3.50 per square foot after that, looking just at the numbers, because at that point it was like, whoa, like you mentioned scalability, even if this was entirely done by a contractor, they're not going to be charging them that much.
But one of the things we wanted to be cognizant of as well is if there's a lot of different people from different walks of life who are going to apply for this program, some people might be able to have a contractor come out and do all the work for them, and they're going to break even.
We've had a couple people give us their receipts, and we were pretty shocked at how spot on it was, so it was pretty much a full subsidy, which was cool, but a lot of folks are going to DIY this, but the important thing is to remember just the value of their time that they put in that too, so if they're doing that we still want to make sure their time and effort and literal sweat is valued and compensated as well.
Thank you for that.
Yeah, so a quick overview on the Turf By-Back program, the way the process works, because this one is very involved, it starts out with that irrigation evaluation, so a resident reaches out to us and they say, "I'm interested," and we say, "Great."
We verify that they have a utility account, and they're a City of Denton address, and we ask them for a landscape design. The landscape designs are really simple. We just need a sketch of their yard, the cultivars they plan to use, and roughly what it's going to look like.
At that point, once we have that, and then the resident will confirm that they've read our manual and understand the rules of the program, we send an individual out to do the evaluation and to talk through them if there's any modifications that need to be made to the landscape design plan, and we'll have them make that if they need to.
And she'll also ensure that they really do qualify. We really do want to make sure that we're saving water, and even Kat and I were talking about this the other day, we cannot reimburse dirt patches.
And so we just kind of get out there to get that visual check, and then also see what's on their landscape design, if that's something that's even going to work.
They might have picked native cultivars, but they might be full sun and they're trying to put it in a tree yard, and we don't want to set them up for failure. So we'll do that, and then once we're confident that their plan's going to work, their yard is worked, they understand that they are going to have to cap their irrigation system.
And once they're on board with that, we give them essentially a notice to proceed. Once they get the notice to proceed, they have a year from the date of notice to proceed to complete the work.
If their landscape design plan changes throughout the process, we just ask to keep us included in any updates they might have so we can talk through it.
We don't expect it to be exactly, but it still has to be in the spirit of the program. If you replace the salvia with a mist flower, we're not going to disqualify you, but I get to your point, if you replace it with a crape myrtle or a banana plant, you're going to have to talk.
And then they'll let us know that the work is done. We come out to the site, we verify that the work has in fact been done, there's some paperwork, they sign a pledge to keep the yard that way, this is a permanent change.
They sign a pledge for our conservation program to adhere to the twice-week irrigation schedule. If they need any additional water just to establish plantings on a very temporary basis, we give them the approval for that for a tight box time.
Then they're good to go, at which point we turn the materials in, Kat's group QCs all of our work, so we have a second party outside of our department QC-ing the work we do, and then we issue them a check. So that'll come in the mail.
So, do you have an example of a homeowner association that you work with regarding their buyback?
Yeah, actually Rhett Hubbard has been fantastic. So he's over at the homeowners association at Robeson, and we've spent a lot of time talking with him about it, just because if anyone's been through Robeson, it's pretty.
They take their visual standards seriously, and we know he's really involved with that as well, but he's also really resident-minded, so he was kind of our perfect candidate to discuss with, because he's really collaborative with the residents.
And so we worked with him on that, and then we also, while we can't ever promote challenging an HOA, we do have residents reach out with concerns that certain aspects of the program would never be allowed with their HOA.
Yeah, so I really think we need to put a little bit of pressure the way we can, because I know they're against changing the lawn to natives.
So we probably need to do a little bit of more education, what's nice and what is acceptable from the point of view of conservation of water, and also they know so often that obviously they increase the pollution in that area anyway.
So I'm thinking, so Native Plant Society is doing this, but I'm thinking if we put pressure from more angles, if you can help with that, that will educate and talk to them and see what we can get to change the turf to the natives.
That would be wonderful.
Absolutely. In fact, our biggest challenge, and because we do have a vision of bringing the HOAs together and having a meeting with them as well and saying, you know, how can we comply with your visual standards while being conservation minded.
The biggest challenge has been compiling a list of HOAs.
It has been such an odyssey of calling the president or calling somebody and they're owned by a management company in Des Moines and they're owned by someone else, you know, three time zones away from that.
And so we are working on it. In fact, that's another thing Catherine and I have discussed is getting that holistic grouping of HOAs together. And I believe our marketing and communications team is working on that as well, but we would love to partner with them and have that be something that they can promote instead of see as adversarial.
Sure, a native plant society can provide examples of successful mind changing of this on one of the associations. We have a few successful activities that resulted in changing partially or totally turf with natives.
That would be fantastic to get support.
Just to echo Camila a bit, you've talked about trimming the peaks and increasing our, the capabilities of our production, but I know even on Monday, P&B is considering the Ray Roberts expansion project and that's all in the works going forward to that, to Camila's point, like, if this is our stakeholder ship here, we all do eventually have to pay for this infrastructure to produce X amount and you're telling us 70% of it is discretionary and not essential.
I think it is kind of on us as people who look at these issues and see the direct line there that people, you know, your neighbor, water, you're along across the street in the middle of the rain, is creating tax issues for everybody resident down the road.
I think it's really critical for us to be really proactive as Camila is suggesting about working with our current residents and then also we kind of discussed the landscaping plan a bit as well.
We're really looking forward, how do we plan on reductions instead of just planning on increased production, I think that would be really critical, but instead of having to come up with these mitigation goals, just really cutting back on our actual usage in the first place would be really helpful.
Yes.
I know.
You know, to challenge, historically, the water utility has prided themselves on being the silent provider, and there was this odd sense of pride of, you know, they don't think about us until the water doesn't come on because we're in a construction project, and I get it.
I get that that came from a place of humility historically, and that can be appreciated. However, it's landed us so far behind when it comes to communication. If it wasn't for our sustainability department, and specifically the work Kat and her team are doing, we wouldn't even have a voice for our water.
They're consistently sharing our message, and the only channel that consistently shares our message. So, we have a long way to go, but you're right, kind of, and that's that conservation portion of the drought contingency plan is really like how are we pushing value with our residents, especially when we're so far behind and we're growing so fast.
I think currently we're experiencing an 8.11% growth rate, and y'all know as much as I do, you know, driving around town it's like mushrooms after a rainstorm. It's like, whoa, where did this apartment come from? There was nothing here yesterday.
And so now, now is the time in our window to be proactive. We don't have the luxury, you know, one day, we've got to do it now.
I'm really encouraged to hear you say that, actually.
Thank you.
Well, so these are the incentives we have today. And again, these were launched in February, it was a soft launch, and then the Citizen Communication, which is that flyer that comes out with your utility bill.
We advertised these programs for the first time ever from the city's standpoint, and it was the one that hit with the bills in early August, I believe.
And so we did get a little bit of a boom, but for the most part we've been word of mouth. That was intentional because it was the first year we wanted to make sure that we were able to kind of slow and methodically work through these programs and get a process in place.
So that's where we are today, and we touched on this a little bit, but kind of our next steps and where we want to go from here is once we get that AMI AMR, the automated meter reading, that's going to be such a game changer.
Not only, yes, it's going to help us see if people are irrigating outside of the schedule and excessively, and it'll let us send kind of targeted marketing, letting them know about our incentives and so forth.
But the really neat part about AMR that I'm so excited is we are going to be able to help our residents and businesses by spotting leaks right away.
This is real time data. So when we see a 0.5 gallon leak or a 0.5 gallon water usage is their baseline, it'll take us a day to reach out to them and say, hey, you might want to get someone out there.
And that's hugely impactful for our residents. But if you also think about our commercial entities as well, you oftentimes have an administrative staff used to signing purchase orders and invoices of huge dollar amounts.
And when they're inundated with those, they might not notice a significant change in the utility bill, especially because everything is together holistically in one bill, which is easy for the rate payer.
But if your job is just to sign it, there have been so many case studies where businesses have been saved hundreds and thousands of dollars by these leak detections occurring early instead of months down the road.
So we're really encouraged to be able to support the community with this as well.
Additionally, we've been working with marketing and communications, and we're really close to launching our garden sign program.
These are super cute little kind of tin tappers on signs similar to the Wildlife Federation sign, the butterfly garden signs.
There's two different levels. And one of them, if a resident simply says, I agree to irrigate on the irrigation schedule, and they participate in one incentive.
So they either get an evaluation, or they get a new controller, or even if they don't have an irrigation system, they talk to us about some way that they're checking leaks or being proactive in their home.
And they can have a yard sign, so it's on display, and then get the conversation going.
We have another one that's a gold standard yard sign, and this one is if somebody really puts a foot forward with conservation.
So it can be turf buyback, a base sign with ledge, but it can be a turf buyback, it can be a reduction in their baseline yards per capita per day, if they reduce their water use over time by 5%, something like that.
They'll get the yard sign as well. There's going to be no policing of the yard sign, we've gotten that a lot.
What if someone irrigates on the wrong day and the sign's out? We see the value in just promoting it and that visibility as overshadowing any whoopsie.
Sorry, I'm not trying to be critical here, I'm just thinking, we're still talking about just usage, usage, usage, and are you going to follow our schedule? Are you going to conserve? Are you going to mitigate?
But do you think about, because we're thinking about here's a reward structure for people who participate in that program, do you think about how do we engage with people who are like a gold star for you, for people who just don't irrigate?
I don't even know if in our lawn and irrigation or landscape code you referenced at the beginning, do we compel people to have green grass in the summer?
For people who do not irrigate whatsoever, how does the department consider, "Oh, we don't provide services for them right now, I guess."
Yeah, that actually, so that, and then also coupled with multifamily enduranceage is something that's been on our mind as well.
We have a large student body population, they're living in dorms, this is their earth tomorrow, they are passionate about it, but they don't have lawns.
So we have, with the yard sign program, we've also printed some stickers as well, I know it's just stickers for a cup, I like stickers in my cup.
But they can get, sign the pledge and get a sticker to put wherever, but one of the, some of the packages we're working on will include free kind of dye tablet testers.
We're looking at eventually trying to help with e-paid water sense appliances in the home as well, so those are some of the pathways we've gone down so far.
But you are spot on, it's more robust with our single family homes that irrigate at this point in time.
Like in the future.
So yeah, we also want to look at that turf buyback, we touched on this earlier, but how do we also incentivize this for commercial entities, and then how do we, there's a little bit more we can do with institutions.
We're actually in talks with UNT right now about partnering with their sustainability program, and kind of tracking and monitoring, doing somewhat of a turf buyback program with them.
But the trade off would be, we're getting landscape designs from their students, and then those can be used, they're getting practical experience, and those are being used for our residents.
They can just cherry pick from a list of pre-planned yard designs, and so that way they can work together with the students.
We're also looking to see if there's, we've been doing site walks at UNT to see if there's any areas that we could do something similar, and then have those students track and monitor the change in biodiversity after implementation, and then that could be beneficial to their studies.
There's a fantastic professor, Dr. Sly is willing to make some curriculum in support of that for her higher role students as well.
This is all still in the talk phase, but we're doing site work, we're gathering data with the goal of presenting this very soon.
I know Dr. Meyers is about to talk to Duddy Meyers, TWU Garden as well.
So you probably need to know that TWU has a new division, Environmental Science, it's just started this form, so you may want to get in touch with TWU as well, and collaborate, yes.
I don't know if you know, but on TWU campus we have two butterfly gardens, and I'm the director of those gardens.
I bribe my kids to clean a room to come visit the garden, it's beautiful.
We have activities with kids, we educate them very early.
We actually send, we've encouraged a lot of folks with questions to go out there. It's so beautiful, and it's a perfect example of how you can have color around, and it's not cactuses and pebbles.
But I would love that contact. That would be great.
And then yeah, lastly, like I was saying, we want to engage the development community. Not only do we want to make sure there's rules in place from the get-go, so that we are being proactive, not reactive, in development standards.
One of the things we've been looking at as well is kind of mirroring the code that Austin has for on-site reuse, that's still very much in the data gathering phase, but we're focusing a lot on landscaping for that as well.
And we hope to start creating criteria for our developers that would allow them to get a recognition of being specifically water-wise.
And what we would like to do is have that be something really positive on, you know, they've got that chain link fence with the coming soon, and the regulatory compliance and stormwater protection language.
We thought, how cool would that be if we could also put some sort of signage or indication that this person from the get-go is working with us to be conservation-minded and intentional.
So that's one of those things kind of down the pipeline as well, is we hopefully continue to staff up and grow the program.
That's all I have prepared, but I'd be happy to take any questions.
You talked a little bit about the tiered rates. Do you feel like those rates are high enough at the higher usage levels to actually modify people's behavior?
So those rates are -- we do work with a third-party rate analyst to do a cost-of-service study to make sure they're doing cost-of-service study and then they're also kind of analyzing those figures.
We are confident we have -- I think we have eight different rate structures, and it really adds up quick because when folks are at that higher tier, they're -- a lot of times they're really at that higher tier.
So we think so, but we look at it every year and ask that question, but yeah, that's a great question.
I've got two questions. They're both real quick. You keep calling it discretionary use of water. That implies there's a non-discretionary category.
Can you just talk about what are these categories and what goes into which one?
Of course. And actually, rate tiers is a perfect way to couch that. So our lowest rate use, that $3.75 or $0.73 per thousand gallons, to put an imaginary character to this,
think about maybe a single mom who's working two jobs and just needs water for baby formula, water to keep her kids clean and to cook and clean.
That's that base level use. That's indoor use for consumption, cleanliness, sanitation, and health.
And that lower tier should accommodate a family of four easily. It should not go beyond that 5,000 gallons.
For larger families, we have -- it jumps up a little. I want to say it's like $3.90, and that's from 5,000 to 7,000 gallons per month.
And what that's going to do is that's going to provide that same low rate, but now you're looking at a family of seven or eight, or a multi-generational household.
Beyond that, the next couple categories, they kind of take up to are you going to have your kids play in the sprinkler?
Are you going to have some landscaping, then extensive landscaping, and then all the way up to you own a pool and a koi pond and irrigate often.
So we looked at -- when those rates were set, we looked at kind of different use case scenarios.
Once you get beyond that third tier, that's when it becomes more discretionary.
But sorry, it's a lot of words to answer your straightforward question, but essentially it is just those human health, safety, and basic needs are non-discretionary.
And my other one, I think it's tied to this, is as you go into the more enforcement phase, how do you know that people are watering, irrigating too much or on the wrong days?
With current technology, do you just look at meters?
So we have a passionate conservation community, and we get a lot of feedback from, including photo evidence, of people violating the schedule.
We have a process in place. We're already very communicative with residents who are irrigating outside of the schedule.
But 99% of the time, it's -- I would like to remain anonymous. My next door neighbor is watering at this day. Here's a photo.
So what we do is we send them a letter with the cute little magnet with the irrigation days on it so they can put it on their fridge.
And we say, "Hey, you might not be aware, but this schedule was passed at this date. It is mandatory. We've got incentives to help you get there. Reach out if you have any problems."
That first letter, we mark that they got it, but that hasn't started the clock.
If after 10 days -- so we give them 10 days to say maybe they went on vacation, maybe their mail stacks up, maybe -- whatever.
But if within 10 days, post 10 days, we get another diligent report of this individual with photographic evidence, we then give them their first warning letter.
And it's very kind. It does not come with a magnet because they already have that, hopefully. But we say, "Hey, you know this. You've got to comply. This is the schedule."
We again mention our programs. We even contact information. We point them to the website for more information.
The next time -- so if they go within 10 days after that, if they do it again, we actually come outside and knock on their door.
At that point, we've been able to surmise that mail is not effective, and we knock on the door and we just leave the door hanger.
And it lists, again, basically the same thing, but a bridge to put on a door hanger.
And then hopefully if they answer the door, we can say, "Hey, here's who we are, here's what we do, and here's how we can help you."
And we have actually done that before. The third one, after that, if we're still not getting anywhere with them, we do send them a letter.
And we have our process in place. We've worked with actually Chris and our prosecutor as well to work out a process to where we could take them to municipal court.
And then at that point, it would be court fees plus the fine up to $2,000 as determined by the judge.
We haven't had to get there yet, and we're actually trying to get an ordinance in place to move away from that so that we could just do an administrative fine.
We're still working through that process, but that's kind of how we let folks know.
So far, again, we haven't had to get to that point yet. We do a good job, too, of trying to reach out and call folks and see who's listed in DCAT.
How could we get a hold of them? Because at the end of the day, a fine isn't going to make our lakes any bigger.
We don't get the fine. It goes to the court system. It's more like I can tell my kids three times something nice and then mommy has to yell.
That's the equivalent of that, but that's kind of how that works.
You had said at the beginning, 2006 was the first time I won a landscape ordinance. Was it passed that came with an irrigation schedule?
Apologies. So that was the first time we put any regulations in place surrounding irrigation.
There's a lot of landscape ordinance. There's a lot, too, and it's a really good ordinance.
But specific to irrigation within it, that's where it says you can't have a busted geyser come out of your yard, or you can't have excessive runoff of waste.
And then it also prohibits that evaporative loss during the summer months, where if you water between 10 and 6, it's kind of like trying to water a cast iron skillet with a spray bottle.
And then it prohibits the danger of freezing systems by watering in it.
To Adam's point, a lot of the feedback that I've heard online and that my own neighbors, who care a lot about green lawns, were surprised at the recent ordinance.
Gosh, this is civil overreach. The government's putting in my grass.
I was interested to hear you cite that history because I guess it kind of trails that narrative of thought that this is not new for anybody.
We all live in a society, but it's just good to hear that there's been really diligent following through from the department about making sure that the people who are kind of on the heavy use side of the spectrum are receiving the types of programs that are really targeted for people who might be using more than may be necessary.
I received a bit of feedback as well. Yeah, it's a change. It's a change, but it's necessary.
Do we already require separate meters for irrigation for new development and new installation?
It is actually anomalous to require that for a residential address. Typically it's all in the same meter, but we will require it if it's commercial or if it's commercial of a certain size, if it's a building in a strip center and there's no.
But commercial and then institutional like her schools and whatnot. It's standard to have that separate irrigation meter, but not residential now.
Any other questions.
Thanks a lot. Yeah, thank you so much for your interest and the opportunity to share what we're doing.
Okay.
Next on the agenda is to receive a report hold discussion and consider approval of the fiscal year 2025 2026 sustainability framework fund work plan.
Catherine Barnett, sustainability manager, just going to take a quick walk through of the framework fund work plan that we developed after our previous month's meeting and what we talked about the different priorities and the programs that were proposed.
And you should have a copy of the framework document in your backup.
So, as we discussed at the previous meeting 550,000 dedicated towards transportation travel and movement focus area.
Air quality greenhouse gas management transportation and the framework. We have the levels of the funding for the different rebate programs, the parks movers, a little bit for the air quality sensors, LNM, and 140,000 the pipeline connections and one thing we did leave in that we talked about removing was the city fleet vehicle support.
We may have the opportunity to replace some vehicles this year with electric, so we would like to leave that in to support if the funding allows and if the vehicle replacements happen.
So that's why that's still in the document.
In the building focus area where the 350,000 that we discussed and partner for the energy efficiency upgrades for the lower income homes.
This is one where they they had up to 50 homes that we may have a little bit of savings here that could go towards the electric vehicles.
And then in the land use area, we have 200,000 for lower exceedings, say for us to school shade projects, and then the ecosystem protection enhancement continue those programs.
Any questions.
I have a question.
Is there any way on the website to publicize both the economic and environmental benefits to a household or an individual that these incentives, doing what they're going to do, the economic and environmental, especially the economic, how much money are you going to be saved, or could you be saved by doing this?
We can take an average home, because every house is going to be different.
Sure.
What, you know, the square footage, how much they use, how many people live in that house.
But we could probably take the average usage home and calculate some savings for that.
Yeah, because I'm looking at the website and then comparing it to other situations where, hey, look how much money you could possibly save.
I think that might be an appeal, especially in these times, to people as well, the environmental aspects of it.
I have a comment.
I don't know if this goes into this portion of the agenda.
So, my understanding is that we look at what you present and practically we consider approval or whatever, but I have a question about land use.
I know that you placed there environmental protection, and my concern is that with the large development that goes on in Denton, we practically put in danger local ecosystems,
especially environmentally sensitive areas.
We practically fragment even more what we have as local ecosystems, which means lower biodiversity.
And as we know, we rely on this biodiversity to live.
So, I wonder, maybe we discuss this in the future, what you mean exactly by ecosystem protection and what can we do?
This is a serious problem.
It's not obvious.
We talk more about water conservation, how to mitigate pollution and all those, because we feel those.
But this is a quiet risk that we take, and this is going to maybe or obviously affect us all.
And I think that's something that we can bring back and talk about how everything can work together.
Sure.
Yes.
Thank you.
One other.
Sorry, we're still chatting.
I heard Amy talk about the Notice to Proceed process that they have for the Turf Buyback Program.
And I've been thinking about ways of accessibility for some of our rebates, because obviously the rebate means that you have to up front the capital first.
And then you get it back.
Since we've moved the EV and e-bike program out from Greensense to where it wouldn't just be thrown on a utility bill or whatever.
I'm curious, and this is not a now thing, but in the future, I'd be interested if the office could think about ways that we could develop some sort of, let's broadly call it, a financing plan.
Where, you know, if you've applied for this program, you know you intend to purchase, say, an e-bike, and you're going to be commuting, and that's your primary transportation.
And I want to do this, and I can't afford it unless we get this rebate, but I don't have, you know, $800 to put down up front.
If we, when they apply, develop a process of slotting people in as like a pre-approval or whatever we'd like to call it, that once they purchase that, we process that application.
We issue the rebate for the qualified purchase.
And that person doesn't have to, I don't know, some process of enabling people who can't up front the capital, but would be able to otherwise, having received the rebate, I just wonder if there's something we could develop that's similar to that notice to proceed process with the TURF IRAC.
That you're in there, we've got you, we're looking at your application in some way of, I'm even thinking, gosh, if there was a way to partner with our local credit union or something that can line that over.
And I understand there's limitations on staff time, there's a lot of limitations on staff time, but this is one of the biggest criticisms I get about our rebate program is that it's $750, 50% off of a bike.
That's not a person who needs to use this for a transportation bike, that's a person who's doing this because they could have already bought it essentially anyway.
When a lot of our entry level products are in the $400 to $500 market, we can only cover 50% up to $750, and that's the criticism I get pretty frequently, especially from younger people in our community at UNT or in our different schools.
That if we can think about maybe this next year, ways we can develop some sort of plan for these smaller purchase items that really make meaningful differences in people's lives. I understand it's going to take a lot, so it's way down the road, but just something that we could consider.
That's interesting, we actually talked about e-bikes and transportation with a UNT class last week, and they're going to work on a survey, so maybe we can build in some of that information about what is the hurdle, what would help you be able to do the e-bike, and maybe get that, so it'll be going out through UNT for sure.
That's really cool. So there's some opportunity there, I hear you.
I hear that, and I understand staff are the ones individually processing all these applications, and so another thing in my mind is at some point we pull out maybe sustainability funding from the S Fund goes to a literal line item that pays for an intern or somebody to help you guys.
You can focus on these heavy-hitting items, and there's somebody there to help with this procedural work, but I'd really be interested in the results from that feedback survey.
Any other discussion? Do you need approval from us?
Yes. Just recognition.
I move for adoption of the F-426 work plan, as presented.
Do we have a second?
So we approve. Thank you.
Mr. Chair, you didn't take the vote.
Oh, I didn't. Oh, I hid in my mind.
So next we have staff reports.
And we have a memo from Solid Waste, just some information about the Starter Film Densifier, rockin' and rollin' over there.
Karen did a summary of our fan giveaway, and she developed a map just to show where all the fans went, so throughout the community.
And the pick-up events that we did on Fridays at the different locations seemed to go really well, so instead of the big Saturday event, we did multiple small ones.
And then we have the matrix.
Any questions about the matrix?
Anybody have anything they want to put on the matrix?
Yep.
Okay, so last time in September we had that wonderful presentation by Tony Puentes, and I think he missed some points there,
and I would like an update on the pollution costs if we acquire additional dispatchable generation, especially guests, whatever.
And then I really want him to clarify, at least for me, if not for everybody, or give us details.
Details of the recently passed Texas legislation regarding acquiring dispatchable generation, and how he recommends to do that, acquire the dispatchable generation.
And I have one more, and that came to mind because we talked about land use and ecosystem protection.
I know that Michael was working on the Corridor Survey a few years ago. I would like an update on that and how is that survey going into this land and ecosystem protection.
Is that possible?
In other words, we did the survey, what did we do with that?
Do you have anything?
No, Katherine, I am wondering if Kamelia's DME request could be combined with my item that I requested at the last meeting for Tony to come back with that presentation regarding the IRP and the renewable resource plan.
It just seems fitting that he's going to be here discussing new generation capacity and dispatchable power. It was related to the IRP discussion from last presentation.
Yeah, let's get it all together.
And I have one, if possible.
A couple of weeks ago, the City Council had a presentation on the renewable gas landfill plan.
And I would appreciate it, if possible, if we could get that presentation here since we were in on the ground floor of that project.
Thank you. Anything else?
We have a motion for adjournment.
We have a motion to adjourn.
All in favor?
We are adjourned at 2 p.m.